


Mr and Mr Xavier

by lachatblanche



Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Humor, M/M, mild violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-06
Updated: 2017-09-06
Packaged: 2018-12-24 18:05:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12018177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lachatblanche/pseuds/lachatblanche
Summary: Charles and Erik are an exceedingly normal married couple who have been together for five exceedingly normal years.At least, that's what they'd like everyone else to think.AMr and Mrs SmithAU.





	Mr and Mr Xavier

Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr were a handsome married couple who lived in a handsome white-picket-fenced home in a handsome suburban neighbourhood.

They had a sensible, neatly-trimmed lawn, owned two sensible, eco-smart cars, and vacationed twice a year in sensible, tourist-filled locations. They paid their taxes, supported local businesses, subscribed to a number of charities and never drove above the national speed limit. They had their friends over for dinner every other month, and they said good morning to their neighbours every day before setting off for work.

They were, by all accounts, a very happy, loving, and exceedingly _normal_ couple. 

 

… Except when they weren’t.

*****

Charles was vacationing in Kuala Lumpur around the time when he and Erik first met. He spent the first night of his holiday peacefully sleeping away his jet lag in a five-star hotel, the next four happy days he spent in the sun, sampling the cuisine and seeing the sights, and on the sixth day he shot a very rich, very corrupt banker in the head. On the seventh day, he met Erik.

Erik, coincidentally, had also been holidaying in Malaysia at the time. He stepped off the plane, checked into a nearby hotel, allowed himself the luxury of sleeping for six whole hours, and then the next day he knifed a senior politician between the ribs and left him choking in a puddle of his own blood. The very next day, he ran into Charles. 

It was love at first sight for the both of them.

They bickered, then dated, and five months later they tied the knot and settled down.

They then proceeded to live happily ever after.

Almost.

*****

The first year of marriage was idyllic.

The second year was warm.

The third year things drifted.

The fourth year was uncomfortable.

By the fifth year, they were complete strangers.

Not that they had ever known everything about each other before; it was just that now they didn’t care to know anything further.

*****

According to Charles, Erik worked at a construction firm where he was a Very Important Person building Very Important Buildings for Very Important Clients. He went to work at nine o’clock in the morning and returned home at six o’clock every single evening.

Except when he didn’t. The world of construction had a lot of sudden, last minute emergencies, it seemed, and Erik was, for whatever reason, required to be present for _all_ of them.

 

According to Erik, Charles worked as a scientist at a well-regarded, well-funded laboratory filled with a lot of soft, brainy, in-door types. He went to work whenever he wanted and returned pretty much whenever he wanted too.

It drove Erik mad, but he reserved his ire for the times when Charles wasn’t home in time for dinner.

They had a lot of late dinners.

*****

‘Mrs Parfitt is holding another one of her fundraisers tomorrow,’ Charles said over Friday’s supper as he mentally calibrated the amount of poison he would need to dose a Somalian warlord’s lamb stew with in order to effect a seemingly natural death. ‘We should stop by if we can.’

‘Oil prices are going up again,’ Erik grunted over his Wednesday morning newspaper, contemplating the best perch for the sniper rifle he was going to use to assassinate a corrupt senator later that week. ‘Third time this month already.’

Murmurs of vague interest would follow from each side and, with the requisite quota of conversation over for the time-being, both Charles and Erik would go back to happily thinking about the most efficient and practical way to murder someone before dinner time.

After all, predictability may have suited married life but it did most certainly not suit assassination.

*****

Charles, unbeknownst to Erik, worked for an institution called the Fraternity. He had been recruited at the tender age of sixteen and, thanks to good job security, excellent remuneration and an admirable personal skill-set, had continued with his line of work throughout his adulthood.

The Fraternity masqueraded as an elite scientific institution but in reality their speciality was more in the area of problem-solving. If, that is, the problem in question was a human being, and the method of solving said problem involved placing a bullet between its eyes. 

Erik, unbeknownst to Charles, worked for a corporation called the Hellfire Club. He had worked there for almost seven years, which was the longest that he had ever stayed anywhere. He didn’t hate his handlers, the money was good and he didn’t really have to talk to anyone if he didn’t want to, which was a step up from most of the jobs he had worked in the past. Otherwise, the work he did was pretty much of the same sort as he had always done.

The Hellfire Club had, at one point, been known as the Brotherhood. It turned out, however, that too many people got it confused with its rival, the Fraternity, so in the end the company had done the sensible thing and had changed its name. The fact that they had done so voluntarily did not stop them from bearing a grudge, however, which, in early days, had caused a significant bit of trouble between the two institutions.

A truce was eventually reached over the years: the Fraternity did not infringe on Hellfire’s business, and Hellfire didn’t poach jobs from the Fraternity.

Well. That was the principle, at any rate.

*****

‘Fuck,’ Charles cursed, frowning as he spotted the interloper drawing zigzags on the sand on a quad bike barely a mile away from where Charles’s target was in discussion with a notorious arms dealer in front of two large black trucks. A few minutes prior, Charles’s only problem had been trying to stifle the impulse to kill the both of them instead of letting the arms dealer go free. Now he had a moron on a monster bike to deal with.

‘Fuck,’ Erik muttered from atop his quad bike when he noticed the glint of a sniper rifle from high up on a dune. He gritted his teeth as he mentally adapted his plan. He could no longer take his time with this; he needed something quick and dirty. He sighed, brought his bike to a stop, and then reached down and pulled out the miniature rocket launcher that he had stashed there on an impulse. The arms dealer would have to go as well, he figured, but he wasn’t all that torn up about that.

‘Fuck,’ Charles hissed as he saw the interloper – no longer a casual intruder but an actual fucking _rival_ – pull out his weapon and take aim at the convoy where his mark stood.

‘Fuck,’ Erik snarled as a sudden hail of bullets tore through the metal of the trucks, milliseconds before he could press the trigger on his rocket launcher. 

‘ _Fuck_ ,’ both Erik and Charles swore as their mark, whose fortuitous sneeze had saved him from being shot through the head, threw himself behind his truck, even as the rest of the men present fled. Seconds later, Erik’s rocket – hastily aimed – touched down, grazing the front of the furthest truck and causing an explosion that blocked everything from view. 

‘Fuck,’ Erik and Charles said again when they finally realised that their target had not died and instead was fleeing the scene in his truck, blocked from view by the column of thick black smoke behind him.

Then, between one breath and the next, they turned on each other and began to fire.

*****

Luckily for everyone involved, they both missed.

*****

‘I need to find out who that bastard is,’ Charles tells his tech guy, Hank, glaring at the blurred image his body-cam had managed to capture in the heat of the proceedings. ‘And then I need to kill him. Painfully.’

‘Find me that son of a bitch,’ Erik growls at his longsuffering protégé, Alex, who is already busy hacking into a government satellite that was helpfully positioned just above the desert where the showdown occurred. ‘And then fetch me the biggest knife we have, because I am going to _gut_ that piece of shit.’

*****

Erik and Charles had had many awkward moments in their lives. The moment they had first tried having sex while ridiculously drunk. The moment where they’d had to introduce each other to their (largely fake) wider families. The moment when Erik had revealed himself to be a closet fan of Barry Manilow.

None of these moments, however, were quite as awkward as the moment when they found out that their other half was not a mild-mannered harmless civilian, but in actual fact a very much not harmless deadly assassin.

*****

‘Um,’ says Hank, staring at the no longer blurred image from the body-cam.

‘Well shit,’ Alex says with raised eyebrows when satellite image loads onto his screen.

Charles and Erik, on the other hand, are very pointedly silent.

*****

Needless to say, dinner that night is somewhat eventful.

‘You bastard, you told me that you worked in construction!’ Charles hisses as he slashes at Erik with a large and pointy carving knife.

‘What can I say,’ Erik sneers, wielding a rolling pin like a club. ‘I’ve demolished a building or two in my time.’ He juts out his chin as Charles scoffs. ‘As if you can talk, _darling_. I suppose _your_ knowledge of science and labs is limited to formulating poisons? Like the one you dosed our wine with, for example?’

Charles smiles sweetly. ‘Not _just_ poisons, dear,’ he says venomously. 

Somewhere behind Erik, the microwave _pings_.

Erik’s eyes meet Charles’s. _No_ , his eyes seem to say. _Not my brand new high-tech microwave and combination oven_.

Charles’s smile widens.

And then the microwave explodes, showering them both with rock and debris and effectually demolishing Erik’s previously beloved, spotless kitchen.

*****

Things only worsen from that moment on.

*****

‘And to think that all this time I thought that the reason you always missed dinner was because you were doing something worthwhile like curing fucking cancer,’ Erik snarls as he straddles Charles and attempts to throttle him. ‘Now it turns out you were missing dinner to _kill people_!’

‘Yeah, well _you_ bailed on me during our third wedding anniversary because you had a fucking _work emergency_!’ Charles hisses, smacking Erik around the head with a wooden chopping board and knocking him back. ‘You were off _killing people_ on our anniversary!’

‘At least I _remembered_ it was our anniversary!’

‘Oh for—’ Charles rolls his eyes in exasperation and wipes away the blood dripping down his upper lip. ‘It was _one time_ , why do you _always_ have to bring that up?’ And then he flings himself on Erik and proceeds to punch him repeatedly in the face while Erik knocks Charles’s head back into the wall.

This goes on for a while.

Sadly, their attempts to murder one another are interrupted by the arrival of two dozen kevlar-vested black-ops agents with guns shooting bullets through their walls.

*****

Two shoot-outs, seventeen kills, and one speedy getaway later, Charles and Erik find themselves holed up in the dark corner of a cheap bar sitting across from their former minions.

‘So basically what you’re saying is that our agencies turned on us and they both want us dead because they found out that we were married and they think that we’ve been colluding this whole time?’ Charles says flatly over the top of a foaming pint of shitty beer.

‘And that they’re now working together so that they can get rid of us because they think that we did the _exact same thing_ that they are _currently_ doing?’ Erik adds with gritted teeth, clutching his tiny glass of vodka hard enough for it to crack.

Hank and Alex look at each other. 

‘Yes,’ Hank says apologetically. 

‘Yup,’ Alex agrees with a shrug, looking at Erik. ‘Turns out that neither the Fraternity nor Hellfire are too keen on having their top agents _literally_ sleeping with the enemy.’

Both Charles and Erik scowl at him.

Then Charles turns to Erik and Erik glares back. ‘This is all _your_ fault,’ they both snap bitterly.

To be fair, neither of them are wrong.

*****

‘I can’t go on the run with Erik,’ Charles snaps at Hank when the two are left alone at the table, looking appalled. ‘I’ll probably end up killing him.’

‘I am not running away with Charles,’ Erik says coldly, glaring at Alex from where they are standing by the bar. ‘We wouldn’t last a day together.’

‘You’re the one that married him!’ Alex protests, throwing his hands up in exasperation. 

‘That’s just the problem though,’ Charles says quietly when Hank points out the same thing. ‘It wasn’t _him_ that I married.’

They both look up at that moment, staring at each other from across the room.

They soon look away.

*****

‘We should get a divorce,’ Charles says quietly as they watch Hank and Alex leave separately through the door of the bar.

Erik’s spine stiffens, his face going blank. ‘If you like,’ he says after a long pause, his voice inflectionless.

‘Unless you have any objections?’ Charles studies Erik’s face and then sighs when his expression doesn’t change. ‘I think it would be the best thing for both of us.’

‘Do you?’ Erik’s voice is rough. ‘Do you really?’

Charles doesn’t answer.

*****

‘I can forgive the lies,’ Charles says quietly much, much later when they are alone and safely hidden away in a tiny, run-down motel. ‘I can forgive the deceptions and I can forgive the excuses. What I can’t forgive though—’ he turns to Erik, and his expression is sad. ‘What I can’t forgive is the fact that you were using me this whole time. I wasn’t a husband to you – I was just a cover.’

‘I could say the same to you!’ Erik hurls back before he can stop himself; before he can say _no, it’s not like that at all_.

Charles, however, just smiles sadly. ‘Yes,’ he says, looking away. ‘Yes, I suppose you could.’

*****

Before Erik falls asleep that night, lying stiff and straight-backed on one of the twin beds in the small, dank room, he hears a whisper – low, ephemeral, not meant to be heard – come from the other bed:

‘You were never just a cover to me.’

*****

It takes Erik till the next morning, when masked, armed G-men crash into their motel room, to realise that he’s being an idiot.

Charles is right in the middle of smashing a lamp against the head of one of his assailants and wresting a gun out of the hand of another, when the epiphany hits.

Erik loves Charles. He has _always_ loved Charles. Not even the revelation that Charles is an assassin could ever change that. 

… In fact, the fact that Charles _is_ an assassin – cool, calm, capable and _seriously_ deadly – is actually … in Erik’s mind … it’s –

Well. Erik finds it really, incredibly, stupidly _hot_.

‘Stop gawping at me and _do_ something!’ Charles hisses from where he’s battling two men – and, Erik notes admiringly, thrashing them both. Then Charles’s words actually sink in – as does the grazing tip of a knife that one of the men has pulled out – and Erik goes back to work, focusing on the job at hand.

Mostly.

*****

It takes Charles less than a minute to realise that Erik’s moves are slightly more elaborate than normal, and it takes another thirty seconds for him to realise that Erik is _showing off_. For _him_.

Charles finds himself grinning. He meets Erik’s eyes across the room, and suddenly it’s like they’re dancing. Only with more blood and violence and broken noses.

Also, and Charles is just speaking personally here, but somehow, he finds, he has never found any form of dancing quite this stupidly, ridiculously, _hot_.

*****

They have enough sense to leave the motel immediately after dealing with the incursion, and they have just enough will power to steal a car and drive it five miles away before they pull over onto the side of an abandoned road and then proceed to spend the next hour shagging each other’s brains out.

*****

‘I fucking love you, okay?’ Erik rasps out after they’ve finished round three in the back of their stolen car.

‘Noted,’ Charles replies, panting heavily, his face flushed. ‘And ditto.’

Erik raises an eyebrow.

Charles rolls his eyes. ‘I love you, you dolt. There, satisfied?’

Erik grins. ‘After three rounds? Just about.’

*****

They’re just finishing up round four when their tails catch up with them.

If Charles or Erik didn’t want to kill them before then their ruining the afterglow would definitely have been a sufficient enough motive.

*****

‘I should probably tell you,’ Charles says calmly as he reloads his gun as they’re being chased down the motorway by three dark armoured cars. ‘I was actually married once before.’

Erik takes this in. His jaw twitches minutely. Then he slams down on the brakes, causing Charles to hit his head hard against the front seat. Behind them, one of the cars smacks into a slow-to-stop truck, nearly taking both vehicles out of commission. 

‘To whom, exactly?’ Erik asks through gritted teeth as he scans the background from the overhead mirror. 

Charles rubs his head and scowls. ‘It hardly matters,’ he says crisply, raising his gun and taking a shot at one of the remaining pursuing cars. ‘We were in Vegas and I was very, very drunk. We had it annulled two days later.’

‘Good,’ Erik says bluntly. Then he adds, ‘I’ll be needing the name of the chapel and the exact time and date of the—’ his expression tightens. ‘The _sham wedding_.’

Charles rolls his eyes. ‘Nice try,’ he drawls. ‘But you are _not_ going to kill her, darling.’ His voice is dry, but even so a corner of his mouth twitches upwards.

Erik lets out a _humph_ and ducks his head to avoid a bullet. They’ll discuss this later.

*****

‘We can’t go on like this,’ Charles pants out several hours later. He’s dirty and sweaty and bruised and has a streak of blood running down his cheek.

Erik doesn’t think he’s ever found him more attractive. 

‘You’re right,’ he says after a moment. He himself has not gone unscathed, as evidenced by the cuts and bruises that litter his whole body. ‘This isn’t sustainable. Sooner or later they’re going to catch up with us and we won’t be able to escape so cleanly.’

‘What we need to do,’ Charles says calmly, ‘Is make a decision.’

Erik raises an eyebrow. ‘What did you have in mind?’ he asks.

‘The way I see it, we have two options,’ Charles looks him straight in the eye. ‘We can either cut and run and live out the rest of our lives in Bolivia …’

Erik grimaces. ‘Or?’ 

Charles smiles grimly. ‘Or we can take the fight to those sons of bitches and raze them to the ground.’

Erik smiles and holds up his shotgun. ‘Well then,’ he drawls. ‘What are we waiting for?’

*****

Neither Hellfire nor the Fraternity are easy targets to take out.

Luckily, Charles and Erik are very good at what they do.

Even luckier, they both have talented minions that they are able to convince (and in Erik’s case, browbeat) into aiding them in their attempted take-down.

‘Sure, drag us along for your suicide attempt,’ Alex grumbles even as he crawls along a ventilation shaft clutching a rucksack full of C4. ‘It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.’

‘I don’t suppose anyone knows what happens to our pensions after this,’ Hank sighs, melancholic, as he hacks into the Fraternity’s mainframe.

Erik, listening through his earpiece, just tells them both to shut up, while Charles ignores their gripes entirely and says something positive and friendly and affirming that everyone who’s listening absolutely _knows_ that he pulled out of his ass just to shut them up.

Whatever, Alex thinks grumpily. It’s not like he planned to live past thirty anyway.

*****

In the end, it doesn’t take much to decimate the Fraternity and Hellfire.

Just a few pounds of C4, a shed load of ammunition, an expert hacker, and a good helping of insider knowledge. 

Erik’s gone on Hellfire missions that have required ten times as much.

‘So,’ Alex says as the four of them look up at the burnt-out remains of what was once Hellfire HQ. The Fraternity building had been similarly gutted two hours earlier. ‘Now what?’

Erik and Charles look at each other. 

‘We can’t exactly go home,’ Charles says slowly. ‘There _is_ no home to go back to.’

Erik shrugs. ‘I was never too keen on white picket fences anyway,’ he says with a shrug.

Charles hums thoughtfully. ‘I have a mansion in Westchester, if you’d prefer that?’ he says, looking around at the others.

Erik blinks. ‘You have _what_?’ he says, baffled.

*****

‘Fuck me,’ Alex says when he sees the mansion.

‘I guess I know why you weren’t worried about our pensions,’ Hank says, blinking.

‘Who _are_ you?’ Erik asks, looking a little lost.

*****

‘You know,’ Charles says quietly much, much later, when Hank and Alex have gone to bed. ‘I’m still me. And you’re still you. That’s not changed.’

‘No,’ Erik agrees, staring into the hearth opposite him. ‘But that hardly matters when we never really knew each other to begin with.’

Charles shrugs. ‘I know enough,’ he says simply. ‘And I know I love you. That’s enough for me.’ He pauses. ‘Is it enough for you?’

Erik looks at him.

Charles looks back.

*****

They renew their wedding vows in Vegas two months later with Hank and Alex present, along with Charles’s (real) sister and Erik’s (real) mother as witnesses.

They also take out a blackmailer, a visiting diplomat, and a warlord during the same weekend – proving, as Erik says smugly, that you very much can mix business and pleasure.

Charles later catches him trying to break into the Loveboat Chapel and dig up his old marriage records, however, so the ‘pleasure’ part is somewhat held up for a little while.

‘You are _not_ going to kill Gabrielle,’ Charles says exasperatedly as Erik tries for the hundredth time to explain while standing outside Charles’s hotel room door.

‘Aha!’ Erik exclaims, triumphant at having cunningly wheedled the name out of Charles.

Charles rolls his eyes. ‘What _am_ I going to do with you,’ he sighs. 

Then he pulls Erik in for a kiss, tugging him through the doorway, and slamming the door shut behind him.

An old couple from down the hallway smile after them. ‘Newlyweds,’ they say, amused, and shake their heads.

And, after five long years, it feels like they truly are.


End file.
